wingnut2292
<Verified Sugar Addict>
- Location
- Milwaukee Metro
So, Mr. Granger, just how is Escanaba in da moonlight?
Hermione learns a thing
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
So, Mr. Granger, just how is Escanaba in da moonlight?
Reminds me of a story where a person invented a time machine, and is immediately visited by a time traveler and his robot who convince him to stop because it causes great disaster. Which then causes the travelers to disappear, as their timeline no longer exists.
Thing is there is an after scene where archeologists dug up an item that the travelers dropped a few thousand years in the past, and were trying to puzzle how such a modern item could be thousands of years old. I think it was a steel hatchet in a Dinosaur bone.
Reminds me of Journey to the Centre of the Earth where it all started with a fossil of a flip lighter the protagonist droped near the end of the movie.
- Location
- Dallas, TX
As always, completely brilliant work.
But on to the bit I quoted: the way Hermione has described "the other HOP-users" spell brings to mind something else besides badly kludged electronics or software—a genome. Bits and pieces from all sorts of places, no apparent overall design for efficiency, stuff that does absolutely nothing as far as anyone can tell, prone to catastrophic failure modes, etc.
It is enough to make me wonder if ancient wizards came up with their first teleport spell by capturing some sort of magical creature that evolved teleportation, and then used an old Atlantian ritual (that they barely understood) to "transcribe" the genetic information that let the creature teleport into a spell. And then promptly declared the ritual they had just used to be forbidden blood magic, suppressed it, then took all the credit.
Probably not where you are going with all this, but you must admit it does seem very wizarding.
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy
"I will not be destroyed by some trash can coated with disco balls."
"REAL-LY? THEN I WOULD OB-JECT BE-ING AT-TACKED BY A MO-RON IN DIS-CO FLAIRS!"
"Bring it!"
Thus London's Golem Wars began with disco-related reasons and ended with disco-related reasons. The latter is more literal.
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Conceptually those two ideas indeed seem quite distinct, but mathematically speaking there isn't that much difference between them. It's basically a case of just warping the space more so that the to be traveled distance goes from reduced in a warp drive to zero with a wormhole. And this is basically done in a fairly similar way I thought, thus making these two systems related to each other. Due to this a warp drive system could in theory for instance also create a wormhole in its wake, as a way of connecting two locations while traveling there.
Edit, spelling fix.
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- Location
- Philippines
I remember reading a headcanon somewhere suggesting that the guy is an Unspeakable from the Department of Mysteries.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
An Alcubierre warp drive appears to me to in many ways be a device which pushes the entrance to a wormhole in front of it and closes it behind. It's not exactly like that, but effectively it's doing something not hugely dissimilar.
Harry Harrison came up with a similar idea a long while back for one of his novels, in which the starship drive was based around a teleporter with a range of a few hundred meters. The transmitter at the back of the ship sent the whole ship to the receiver at the front of the ship, which was a few hundred meters away...
Repeat at high speed and you have FTL. Simple.
Daft, but simple
Another example of something that's probably closer is the Alan Dean Foster posigravity drive, which works by having the ship project a hugely powerful artificial gravity well just in front of it. The ship 'falls' towards it, which obviously pushed the gravity well further away, which then it falls towards, and so on. Ultimately for super-science reasons you pass the speed of light and just keep going. He came up with that idea back in the 70s, and as a concept it's really very close to the description of operation of an Alcubierre drive.
The part I find both fascinating and hilarious is that the SF ideas of this sort of thing actually are backed up by real math, even if we can't do it yet, and possibly never will be able to. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it doesn't have something to it.
A Kernel of Truth, if you like. Although that's another story...
That may not be original to him; I first saw it in Niven's old essay The Theory and Practice of Teleportation, and IIRC Gordon R. Dickson also used in it one of his books.Harry Harrison came up with a similar idea a long while back for one of his novels, in which the starship drive was based around a teleporter with a range of a few hundred meters. The transmitter at the back of the ship sent the whole ship to the receiver at the front of the ship, which was a few hundred meters away...
Repeat at high speed and you have FTL. Simple.
Daft, but simple
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Sounds like you're suggesting 'muggles' (maybe all humanity, including magicals) are related to Deep Ones. I suppose you could mix this in with the magicals having the 'blood of Yig' (Father of Serpents), which might explain parseltongue.
I'm reasonably sure our musically mathematical author does plan a Lovecraftian cross-over for HLaT...
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Maybe not as impossible as previously believed. This paper came out last year… [2102.06824] Introducing Physical Warp DrivesAn Alcubierre warp drive appears to me to in many ways be a device which pushes the entrance to a wormhole in front of it and closes it behind. It's not exactly like that, but effectively it's doing something not hugely dissimilar.
Harry Harrison came up with a similar idea a long while back for one of his novels, in which the starship drive was based around a teleporter with a range of a few hundred meters. The transmitter at the back of the ship sent the whole ship to the receiver at the front of the ship, which was a few hundred meters away...
Repeat at high speed and you have FTL. Simple.
Daft, but simple
Another example of something that's probably closer is the Alan Dean Foster posigravity drive, which works by having the ship project a hugely powerful artificial gravity well just in front of it. The ship 'falls' towards it, which obviously pushed the gravity well further away, which then it falls towards, and so on. Ultimately for super-science reasons you pass the speed of light and just keep going. He came up with that idea back in the 70s, and as a concept it's really very close to the description of operation of an Alcubierre drive.
The part I find both fascinating and hilarious is that the SF ideas of this sort of thing actually are backed up by real math, even if we can't do it yet, and possibly never will be able to. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it doesn't have something to it.
A Kernel of Truth, if you like. Although that's another story...
Which shows the apparent possibility of warp drives using only physically plausible configuration of matter. Highly energetic plasma, to be exact.
Now, it has some problems. This geometry does not allow the ship to accelerate; you'll have a warp drive that maintains a fixed, STL speed. That being said, it should still be possible for such a ship to "sweep up" a cargo section after first activating the warp drive, which if achievable would let you dramatically reduce the fuel cost of interstellar travel.
That, and there's no fundamental reason why the field couldn't be unbalanced such that it starts to accelerate. It's just that that would dramatically complicate the equations, and we're still working out the simple case …
But Einstein's cage does appear to be creaking.
Hence why when the warp drive in the original Star Trek movie had an issue, it created a wormhole.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
I'd say the real question might be if Hermione can teach someone else to teach psionics...
I'm... a little concerned that 'fairy' isn't just a misspelling of 'fairly'...
I'd say that proof of the existence of the multiverse, and the possibility of inter-universe travel, would rather 'open the cage' via a side which isn't there in 4D space-time...
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You know, Hermione is a feminine of Hermes, making it connected to the legendary figure Hermes Trismegistus, who was a combination of the Greek god Hermes, and the Egyptian Thoth, who was both god of knowledge, and magic.
I wonder if any of the characters will make that connection.
Thoughts, @mp3.1415player
I wonder if any of the characters will make that connection.
Thoughts, @mp3.1415player
- Location
- uk
- Pronouns
- She/Her
From what I understand of the Alcubierre drive, it's very much not what it's doing. If you imagine the grids that they use to illustrate the space around gravity wells, and that each grid unit is the same amount of space. The drive is somehow manipulating the underlying space so that the packed area in front of it is pushed behind it. Which then allows the ship to move at a multiple of it's thrust relative to an observer, but at it's normal velocity in it's own frame of reference.
A bit like when you partially fill a sausage balloon with water, and then put a ring over the unfilled bit (which represents the ship). If you squeeze the water filled end a little, it will transfer the water to the other side of the ring, and thus the space behind the ring now has more 'space' than the space in front of the ship.
Well on a different topic, getting physical explanations on how say a new field works is for instance strongly linked with just how much data you can get on an area, as well as how rapidly you can test permutations of your ideas.
And in this respect with the amount of data Hermione is generating on the H-field, creating an overarching theory on how that field in specific works might be fairly achievable in a not all to large amount of time. One could argue Hermione is already well under way to a basic description as it is.
So a first pass solution might be pretty quickly done, and while this probably will miss things still, one imagines that with some further experiments that even a second pass might not take that long.
So the real challenge here is really going to be on combining it with the rest of physics. Though there is strongly couples with different fields like the EM field as well as space-time, it wouldn't be surprising if a first rough draft might still not take 'that' long to achieve, for certain relative values of that. Arguably this might even contain hints on how to combine relativity and quantum mechanics, though this implies fully working it all out will probably be the work of many over many years or decades.
And in this respect with the amount of data Hermione is generating on the H-field, creating an overarching theory on how that field in specific works might be fairly achievable in a not all to large amount of time. One could argue Hermione is already well under way to a basic description as it is.
So a first pass solution might be pretty quickly done, and while this probably will miss things still, one imagines that with some further experiments that even a second pass might not take that long.
So the real challenge here is really going to be on combining it with the rest of physics. Though there is strongly couples with different fields like the EM field as well as space-time, it wouldn't be surprising if a first rough draft might still not take 'that' long to achieve, for certain relative values of that. Arguably this might even contain hints on how to combine relativity and quantum mechanics, though this implies fully working it all out will probably be the work of many over many years or decades.
Close. But to be clear, the axe in this story is from an erased timeline. It should not exsist, yet it does. Somehow dropping it further back in time from when it's timeline was both created and ended allowed it to continue to exsist.
I can't remember the series! This used to be my favorite when I was a teenager!
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You're compressing space in front, and expanding it behind, and you've got some spacetime puree around the sides.
Which sounds a lot like the description of the Futurama FTL; "moving the rest of the universe around you" instead of traveling normally.
(Perhaps the UK government will form a committee and agree to go ahead and increase the speed of light earlier than the 23rd century?)
One of the issues is that if your bubble is moving faster than light, there is no longer a way to causally control it and come to a stop anymore. Also the fact that gravity waves propagate at the speed of light, so your leading edge would have some trouble.
You could potentially lay down a hyperlane to the destination with STL infrastructure, and have it act like a giant gravity railgun with pre-planned and carefully timed energy inputs from the rails. Incredibly poor tolerance to faults in timing, but at least you shouldn't have a luggage mass limit since gravity will accelerate it all equally.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No Hermione, we don't do the time travel thing. For reasons.
Guest Omake: Harry Potter and the Psionic Solution
Recent wordz have inspired me to finish this before the main plot moves too far in a potentially incompatible direction.
Omake: Harry Potter and the Psionic Solution
Harry shared a glance with his friend as they approached the suburban house. They'd been through the argument enough times that nothing more needed to be said. While Ron's accusations had stung, Harry had finally admitted to himself that he was right. Harry truly didn't know what he was doing, and he needed help, preferably help from someone he could trust not to sell him out to Voldemort.
That was why they were following up on the tip Professor McGonagall had given them all those months ago. She hadn't been happy when they'd refused to fully explain their mission from Dumbledore, but at the end of the day all she could do was give them a list of contacts and beg them to reach out when they became stuck.
So here they were, stuck, desperate, and approaching someone they knew nothing about in the vague hope that she could help them save the magical world.
With one final glance with Ron, Harry raised his hand to knock. The door opened before he could touch it.
"I thought I told you lot to get lost."
"Er, what?" Harry blinked and stared dumbly at the young woman in the door.
"Wizards," she spat. "I thought I'd seen the last of you years ago." She paused, taking in their visible confusion. "You do seem a bit young, though. Hazing ritual among the Obliviators I suppose? Send the new kids after me for a lark?"
Ron, more familiar with the magical bureaucracy, caught on quickly. "We're not from the Ministry," he jumped in. "Professor McGonagall said you might be able to help us."
This merited a raised eyebrow from the girl. "Interesting. Perhaps you'd best come in." She smirked as they began to follow her through the door, "Do be warned though, wands don't function in or around this house. Should you try to use them you'll be teleported into the Ministry atrium without your clothing."
"That was you?!" Ron exclaimed.
Harry, still trying to regain his footing, managed another, "What?"
"It was all over the Prophet the summer before our first year. Aurors kept turning up wandless and naked in the Ministry atrium, but no one would ever explain why."
The girl nodded grimly. "They took offense when I turned down Hogwarts, and I had to insist quite firmly that I would not submit to having my or my parents' memories modified. Eventually, your ministry and I came to an agreement."
They came to a table, and she gestured at them to sit. "Right," she said, "introductions. I am Dr. Hermione Granger, Ph.D. Physics and Psionics. You two are?"
"Harry Potter," Harry had finally recovered and was desperate to move forward with the actual reason for their visit. "And this is my best mate Ron Weasley."
"Pleasure," she replied. "I admit I am curious. What sort of problem do you have that would cause McGonagall to admit defeat and send you to me? She was rather put out when I called her parlor tricks inefficient, inelegant, and uninspired."
"She, er, doesn't know," Harry admitted. "Professor Dumbledore insisted we keep it a secret. She was annoyed with us, but in the end she let us go with the insistence that we remember some names of people to contact when we inevitably realized we were in over our heads."
"Which you have," Hermione stated.
"We have," he confirmed. "We need a way to destroy this." Harry took the locket off his neck and placed it on the table in front of him.
Hermione stared at it for a few moments. "Easy enough," she claimed, before glancing at him. "And did you also want to destroy the one attached to your forehead?"
Harry froze. A number of memories jumped to the surface. Voldemort possessing him. The visions from Nagini's point of view. The mental connection with his enemy that Dumbledore had never adequately explained, diverting his attention whenever the subject came up.
"What are you on about?" Ron demanded, not quite as quick on the uptake.
"The, ah, 'magic' connected to that necklace is nearly identical to the construct woven into the scar on his forehead," she nodded at Harry. "Did you honestly not know?"
Harry had begun to panic. What little they knew about Horcruxes was clear. The vessel had to be destroyed. He had to be destroyed. Harry was going to die.
Hermione glanced sharply at him, as if she could sense his rising heartbeat. "Whoa, hey, stop. Calm down." Her gaze softened. "What's wrong?"
"It all fits," Harry muttered as despair overtook him. "He never told me, but it all fits. I'm the last one. I'll have to end it once we're done."
It was Hermione's turn to look confused. "Okay, I am definitely missing some context here. I'm going to make some tea, and we're going to have a proper conversation about what's going on." She took on a lecturing tone as items began floating about the kitchen of their own accord. "Are you familiar with the XY problem?"
Harry merely stared, unable to muster a response to either the question or the casual display of power.
"The XY problem is when you're trying to accomplish thing X, and after some fumbling about you decide that the right approach probably involves thing Y. By the time you finally go looking for help, you've fallen too deep down the rabbit hole and start asking highly specific questions about the small bit of thing Y you're struggling with, when you really should be asking questions about thing X.
"So," she concluded, as mugs set themselves down in front of them. "Let's back up a few steps. What is your overall goal here?"
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Ron grumbled.
"Do you want my help or not?" Hermione replied, exasperated. "This is clearly rather important to you, and I think by now we've established that I'm not on speaking terms with anyone interested in your secrets."
"Tell her," Harry gasped, as Ron prepared to object. "Just get it over with and tell her."
So they did. For nearly two hours they discussed Voldemort, Horcruxes ("Souls are real?!" "Yes." Queue furious notepad scribbling. "You're absolutely certain?" "Yes."), and the second blood war.
"So to confirm, you want to track down and destroy all of these to render the terrorist mortal?" Dual nods. "Well then," Hermione stood and gestured for them to follow, the locket floating up behind her. "Let's see what we can do. And yes," she paused as she recalled their earlier conversation. "We can get that thing out of your head without harming you."
She led them up the stairs to what was clearly a bedroom, with a desk buried in… stuff. Harry recognized the sight of a home computer, looking rather more expensive than any of those in Dudley's pile of broken toys. Though it seemed to be missing some important components, like the display. He was less certain about the other pieces of equipment, though he had the vague sense they were related to electronics. Arthur Weasley, he thought, would likely start performing accidental magic in his excitement at seeing the collection.
Hermione sat, cleared some papers off a slightly glowing metal pad, and set the locket down upon it, turning toward the desk as a screen simply appeared, hanging in midair. Harry shared another glance with Ron, this time tinged with confusion, as they settled themselves down on the edge of the bed.
For several long minutes they sat silently, watching as Hermione typed furiously and muttered to herself, technical details composed largely of five-syllable words mixing freely with sharp commentary casting aspersions upon the competence, parentage, and sexual prowess of wizards in general and Herpo the Foul in particular.
"Right," Hermione announced, "I've tweaked my experimental magic detection net, and it looks like we have eleven Horcruxes in Britain."
"That's… a lot more than we were expecting," Ron said nervously.
Hermione shrugged and stared at her screen a bit longer. "Six seem to share some common markers with this locket. At a guess, I'd say the other five belong to other people."
Harry wasn't quite sure how to respond to any of that and simply sat as she continued.
"Of the six, we have two here in this room, one the middle of nowhere in Scotland - Hogwarts, maybe? -, one deep under London, somewhere near the Charing Cross spatial anomaly-"
"Are you talking about Diagon Alley?" Ron cut in. "That sounds like Gringotts."
"If you say so. The last two are in Wiltshire, but both are moving around."
"I suppose that fits," Harry confirmed. "One of the moving ones is his snake, Nagini, but if there are two then he must have made another."
"Hmmm," Hermione hummed as she typed a bit more. "I'm not sure he did. The last one is slightly different from the others and is connected to a much larger structure. I suspect his physical body is using the same sort of construct to bind his soul in place."
"So you can track exactly where he is," Harry breathed, admiringly.
"Yes, I can make you a tracer of some sort to hunt him down and arrest him or whatever, or…" she trailed off, appearing uncomfortable, "it's not actually any more difficult to unravel that particular soul binding along with all the rest." Seeing their confused looks, she continued, "From here. Right now."
Harry stared, feeling hope for the first time in months, before reality crashed back into him. "Won't work," he sighed. "There's a prophecy."
Seeing Hermione's aggrieved look, as she visibly prepared to launch into a rant about the merits of fortune-telling and evils of leaving out critical information, Ron jumped in. "Harry has to kill him."
Hermione glared until he continued, "'Either must die at the hand of the other.' Anyone else who tries to kill him will fail spectacularly. It's the entire reason Harry's survived all the insanity he has."
"So if Harry were to push a big red button?"
Harry thought for a moment before confirming. "That could work."
"Fine," Hermione grumbled, as she looked back to her computer.
Twenty minutes later, Harry pushed a button. With his hand.
A/N not particularly happy with the ending, but I hope it works. The original plan had Hermione contacting the Home Secretary through the government contacts she's presumably gathered over the years ("You know that magical terrorist you were complaining about? I've got a piece of his soul on my desk. What do?"). The whole plot spiraled out of control and left this omake in an unfinished state for months, so this is what happened instead.
Omake: Harry Potter and the Psionic Solution
Harry shared a glance with his friend as they approached the suburban house. They'd been through the argument enough times that nothing more needed to be said. While Ron's accusations had stung, Harry had finally admitted to himself that he was right. Harry truly didn't know what he was doing, and he needed help, preferably help from someone he could trust not to sell him out to Voldemort.
That was why they were following up on the tip Professor McGonagall had given them all those months ago. She hadn't been happy when they'd refused to fully explain their mission from Dumbledore, but at the end of the day all she could do was give them a list of contacts and beg them to reach out when they became stuck.
So here they were, stuck, desperate, and approaching someone they knew nothing about in the vague hope that she could help them save the magical world.
With one final glance with Ron, Harry raised his hand to knock. The door opened before he could touch it.
"I thought I told you lot to get lost."
"Er, what?" Harry blinked and stared dumbly at the young woman in the door.
"Wizards," she spat. "I thought I'd seen the last of you years ago." She paused, taking in their visible confusion. "You do seem a bit young, though. Hazing ritual among the Obliviators I suppose? Send the new kids after me for a lark?"
Ron, more familiar with the magical bureaucracy, caught on quickly. "We're not from the Ministry," he jumped in. "Professor McGonagall said you might be able to help us."
This merited a raised eyebrow from the girl. "Interesting. Perhaps you'd best come in." She smirked as they began to follow her through the door, "Do be warned though, wands don't function in or around this house. Should you try to use them you'll be teleported into the Ministry atrium without your clothing."
"That was you?!" Ron exclaimed.
Harry, still trying to regain his footing, managed another, "What?"
"It was all over the Prophet the summer before our first year. Aurors kept turning up wandless and naked in the Ministry atrium, but no one would ever explain why."
The girl nodded grimly. "They took offense when I turned down Hogwarts, and I had to insist quite firmly that I would not submit to having my or my parents' memories modified. Eventually, your ministry and I came to an agreement."
They came to a table, and she gestured at them to sit. "Right," she said, "introductions. I am Dr. Hermione Granger, Ph.D. Physics and Psionics. You two are?"
"Harry Potter," Harry had finally recovered and was desperate to move forward with the actual reason for their visit. "And this is my best mate Ron Weasley."
"Pleasure," she replied. "I admit I am curious. What sort of problem do you have that would cause McGonagall to admit defeat and send you to me? She was rather put out when I called her parlor tricks inefficient, inelegant, and uninspired."
"She, er, doesn't know," Harry admitted. "Professor Dumbledore insisted we keep it a secret. She was annoyed with us, but in the end she let us go with the insistence that we remember some names of people to contact when we inevitably realized we were in over our heads."
"Which you have," Hermione stated.
"We have," he confirmed. "We need a way to destroy this." Harry took the locket off his neck and placed it on the table in front of him.
Hermione stared at it for a few moments. "Easy enough," she claimed, before glancing at him. "And did you also want to destroy the one attached to your forehead?"
Harry froze. A number of memories jumped to the surface. Voldemort possessing him. The visions from Nagini's point of view. The mental connection with his enemy that Dumbledore had never adequately explained, diverting his attention whenever the subject came up.
"What are you on about?" Ron demanded, not quite as quick on the uptake.
"The, ah, 'magic' connected to that necklace is nearly identical to the construct woven into the scar on his forehead," she nodded at Harry. "Did you honestly not know?"
Harry had begun to panic. What little they knew about Horcruxes was clear. The vessel had to be destroyed. He had to be destroyed. Harry was going to die.
Hermione glanced sharply at him, as if she could sense his rising heartbeat. "Whoa, hey, stop. Calm down." Her gaze softened. "What's wrong?"
"It all fits," Harry muttered as despair overtook him. "He never told me, but it all fits. I'm the last one. I'll have to end it once we're done."
It was Hermione's turn to look confused. "Okay, I am definitely missing some context here. I'm going to make some tea, and we're going to have a proper conversation about what's going on." She took on a lecturing tone as items began floating about the kitchen of their own accord. "Are you familiar with the XY problem?"
Harry merely stared, unable to muster a response to either the question or the casual display of power.
"The XY problem is when you're trying to accomplish thing X, and after some fumbling about you decide that the right approach probably involves thing Y. By the time you finally go looking for help, you've fallen too deep down the rabbit hole and start asking highly specific questions about the small bit of thing Y you're struggling with, when you really should be asking questions about thing X.
"So," she concluded, as mugs set themselves down in front of them. "Let's back up a few steps. What is your overall goal here?"
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Ron grumbled.
"Do you want my help or not?" Hermione replied, exasperated. "This is clearly rather important to you, and I think by now we've established that I'm not on speaking terms with anyone interested in your secrets."
"Tell her," Harry gasped, as Ron prepared to object. "Just get it over with and tell her."
So they did. For nearly two hours they discussed Voldemort, Horcruxes ("Souls are real?!" "Yes." Queue furious notepad scribbling. "You're absolutely certain?" "Yes."), and the second blood war.
"So to confirm, you want to track down and destroy all of these to render the terrorist mortal?" Dual nods. "Well then," Hermione stood and gestured for them to follow, the locket floating up behind her. "Let's see what we can do. And yes," she paused as she recalled their earlier conversation. "We can get that thing out of your head without harming you."
She led them up the stairs to what was clearly a bedroom, with a desk buried in… stuff. Harry recognized the sight of a home computer, looking rather more expensive than any of those in Dudley's pile of broken toys. Though it seemed to be missing some important components, like the display. He was less certain about the other pieces of equipment, though he had the vague sense they were related to electronics. Arthur Weasley, he thought, would likely start performing accidental magic in his excitement at seeing the collection.
Hermione sat, cleared some papers off a slightly glowing metal pad, and set the locket down upon it, turning toward the desk as a screen simply appeared, hanging in midair. Harry shared another glance with Ron, this time tinged with confusion, as they settled themselves down on the edge of the bed.
For several long minutes they sat silently, watching as Hermione typed furiously and muttered to herself, technical details composed largely of five-syllable words mixing freely with sharp commentary casting aspersions upon the competence, parentage, and sexual prowess of wizards in general and Herpo the Foul in particular.
"Right," Hermione announced, "I've tweaked my experimental magic detection net, and it looks like we have eleven Horcruxes in Britain."
"That's… a lot more than we were expecting," Ron said nervously.
Hermione shrugged and stared at her screen a bit longer. "Six seem to share some common markers with this locket. At a guess, I'd say the other five belong to other people."
Harry wasn't quite sure how to respond to any of that and simply sat as she continued.
"Of the six, we have two here in this room, one the middle of nowhere in Scotland - Hogwarts, maybe? -, one deep under London, somewhere near the Charing Cross spatial anomaly-"
"Are you talking about Diagon Alley?" Ron cut in. "That sounds like Gringotts."
"If you say so. The last two are in Wiltshire, but both are moving around."
"I suppose that fits," Harry confirmed. "One of the moving ones is his snake, Nagini, but if there are two then he must have made another."
"Hmmm," Hermione hummed as she typed a bit more. "I'm not sure he did. The last one is slightly different from the others and is connected to a much larger structure. I suspect his physical body is using the same sort of construct to bind his soul in place."
"So you can track exactly where he is," Harry breathed, admiringly.
"Yes, I can make you a tracer of some sort to hunt him down and arrest him or whatever, or…" she trailed off, appearing uncomfortable, "it's not actually any more difficult to unravel that particular soul binding along with all the rest." Seeing their confused looks, she continued, "From here. Right now."
Harry stared, feeling hope for the first time in months, before reality crashed back into him. "Won't work," he sighed. "There's a prophecy."
Seeing Hermione's aggrieved look, as she visibly prepared to launch into a rant about the merits of fortune-telling and evils of leaving out critical information, Ron jumped in. "Harry has to kill him."
Hermione glared until he continued, "'Either must die at the hand of the other.' Anyone else who tries to kill him will fail spectacularly. It's the entire reason Harry's survived all the insanity he has."
"So if Harry were to push a big red button?"
Harry thought for a moment before confirming. "That could work."
"Fine," Hermione grumbled, as she looked back to her computer.
Twenty minutes later, Harry pushed a button. With his hand.
A/N not particularly happy with the ending, but I hope it works. The original plan had Hermione contacting the Home Secretary through the government contacts she's presumably gathered over the years ("You know that magical terrorist you were complaining about? I've got a piece of his soul on my desk. What do?"). The whole plot spiraled out of control and left this omake in an unfinished state for months, so this is what happened instead.
- Location
- Here
Isn't a constant STL speed the default condition when no unbalanced outside forces are applied to an object?
While interesting from a test bed perspective, until a way of applying a force vector can be safely added, this does not sound all that useful.
Can't find rest of omake series?
Ah, but you are overlooking two things: first, there is no such thing as deceleration, just acceleration in the opposite direction. Secondly, gravity is just a special type of acceleration towards mass.
Basically "no unbalanced outside forces" is an extremely rare scenario for a moving object, and an extremely valuable state to be able to induce at will. No gravity, no friction, no air-resistance, no drag.
Stick your space-ship on a giant catapult/slingshot, and activate the drive as you reach the end. So long as it is turned on, you will ignore all outside forces, and travel in a perfectly straight line. That completely negates the tyranny of the rocket equation, and redefines space-travel as we know it.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
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It's the default conception of moving objects, yup.
The difference is that in this case it'sa constant STL warp of a bit of space. Not a specific object. This does have applications; it won't necessarily care what's inside that space.